Neocon Fantasies of Empire Crushed: the New Global Reality

By Mark Engler, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted April 21, 2009.

Of course, those who most bemoan the loss of "hyperpower" are the same people who cheered the invasion of Iraq. And unfortunately, in its tenure as a global hegemon, the United States bolstered repressive and undemocratic governments at least as often as it thwarted them. Yet there is some amount of justified caveat here for multipolarists: imperial decline does not guarantee progress. Certainly, other rising powers will need to be subjected to the same level of public scrutiny and democratic criticism as past goliaths.

But while the rejection of both corporate and imperial models of globalization may not be sufficient for creating a more just global order, it is necessary. Today’s economic crisis, global in scope, will mean real pain for working people and for economically vulnerable communities throughout the world, those who will suffer most during a "Great Recession." But there is also hope in this time of crisis. The dual delegitimization of empire and of market fundamentalism has created more space for global alternatives than has existed since the end of the Cold War. Now is a moment ripe for the spread of political and economic visions emerging from below. And it is an opportunity for the United States to craft a vision of international relations more humble, more egalitarian, and more democratic than what has previously been pursued in freedom’s name.

The United States, whatever its troubles, is not going to disappear. Predictions of collapse from the left and right alike usually imagine imperial decline as a more fixed and predetermined process than it is. Economic weakness in the United States, even the displacement of the dollar on the world scene, will not mean that America will fade into irrelevance in one swift, dramatic gesture. The United States remains by far the world’s largest economy, and its military might will dwarf that of up-and-coming rivals for the foreseeable future. Even in a multipolar environment, the United States could hold a status as "first among equals" for decades to come.

More pressing, then, than determining whether the United States is an empire is the question of how Washington will manage the transition to a situation where its relative dominance has diminished. Because the contours of this decline are highly variable, the foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration remain very relevant.

One current danger is that President Obama, while rejecting the brash unilateralism of the Bush administration and pulling back the fist of U.S. hard power, will return to a softer form of imperial power. Under Bill Clinton, the United States used multilateral institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization  (WTO) as primary instruments of foreign policy. While staffed with economists in business suits rather than grunts in fatigues, these bodies exerted considerable control over foreign peoples. 

The international financial institutions forced developing countries to comply with the prescriptions of the "Washington Consensus" in order to receive economic support. These market fundamentalist policies benefited a corporate elite while deepening inequalities and producing very limited growth in the countries where they were implemented. Corporate globalization’s deregulated markets also proved crisis-prone, producing systemic shocks ranging from the Asian financial crisis of 1998 and 1999 to Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001 to the crisis that began with the collapse of America’s subprime housing sector. 

During the Bush years, the power of the IMF and the World Bank dramatically waned, in part because of the discrediting effects of the earlier crises and in part because of the Bush administration’s disinterest in investing in multilateral structures. The Bush White House, with its penchant for unilateralist hard power, did not appreciate the advantages of Clinton’s preferred imperial instruments, and was sometimes downright dismissive of them. British journalist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot perceptively described this as "the unacknowledged paradox in neocon thinking." He wrote in an April 2005 column that the Bush foreign policy operatives,

For critics of the IMF and World Bank, seeing these bodies diminish was a sign of progress. But it now looks like the job of dismantling the past hegemonic order was far from complete. The Bretton Woods system may be more enduring and effective than even Monbiot would have guessed. 

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Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com.

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